A Chapter Is (Re-) Born

SoCoDSA March on 'No Kings or Their Clowns' Farmers Lane Santa Rosa June 14th

Marty Bennett interviews co-chair Jay Belmonarch of the brand new Sonoma chapter.

MB:  Tell me about the origins of the new DSA chapter in Sonoma. 

Jay Belmonarch:   So right after Covid, I had inquired about joining the chapter that had previously existed here. But it had it already dissolved by that point. Then, last October, immediately before the  last election, I got together with a couple of people to discuss forming a new chapter, and once we looked into it we were delighted to find that other groups of people had independently gone to submit the paperwork to start a new chapter. So needless to say, there was a lot of energy and enthusiasm behind it, since then. 

I've been doing organizing and activism since I was a teenager. But I had no history with DSA before that. And actually, most of our core members are new to DSA. Many of them are new to Socialism. Many of them are new to organizing entirely. So starting from scratch presents difficulties. But I think it's an opportunity to build a movement that's truly integrated into the community, inherently, by its very origins. And personally, I believe that is the next step, on the way to mass movement of the working class. 

MB:    So most of those you're working with kind of came to DSA independently based upon their observations of DSA activities elsewhere in the country or the region.? 

JB:   Definitely. I mean Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, figures like Ilhan Omar, have brought more awareness to this type of politics, and it just has been shut out of our culture so completely for so long that a lot of people are discovering it for the very first time now. 

MB:   How are you going to address that internally?  Are you planning, or are you engaged in political education? 

JB: Yes, we have political education programs. We have reading groups. We're doing our first DSA 101 coming up in a couple of weeks. 

MB:   How many members would you say there are now, or members and supporters?

JB:   Right now we are at 160 members, up from zero, like 6 months ago. We have made recruits at pretty much every event we have done so far. And we have put together a very diverse group, not only like in terms of identity and age, but also in a political perspective, and in the types of engagement they want with their community. And we encourage dual membership, especially in groups with a local focus, and that has been instrumental in making alliances that we expect to pay off. As the American fascist movement rolls on, increasingly we have to rely on solidarity. 

MB:   Dual memberships in terms of other progressive organizations? 

Anything pro-democracy.

MB:  Talk a little bit about the immediate and longer-term goals of this chapter. I presume for the last several months here you've just been getting organized as a chapter, and formally laying out the ground rules in the structure? 

Jay: Yeah, we're trying to develop a sustainable organization that's going to be robust enough to be able to do a lot of things simultaneously. So the idea there is that members of our community can plug into our organizer network to make the changes that they want to in their neighborhoods and in their workplaces. We're focused on local impact as a strategy for building power and building reputation. The goal of that is to create alternative systems for our community to care for each other cooperatively. So that we don't have to rely on the state and on capitalist infrastructure that is so rapidly being degraded and stolen away from us. and even locally, you know, like municipal government or petit bourgeoisie, or whatever, they might agree with the concept of preventing illegal seizures or of liberation of marginalized peoples. But they won't risk their power to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves. So we're making an organization that is prepared for the long-term consequences of capitalist decay. 

MB:   And are you going to be engaging in workplace organizing?

JB:   Yes, we are. Just starting to kind of enter that with some local union leadership having joined recently. So we'll be looking into that. And hopefully, we can work with other organizations locally, like Working Families Party. 

MB:  Where are people situated, and what type of workplaces? 

JB:  We have a lot of members in SEIU. Well, I mean, the County is the biggest employer in the area. We have a lot of members in unions in the healthcare industry and teachers. 

MB:  And in terms of the shorter-term goals of the chapter, are there specific campaigns that you've landed on?

JB:   Yeah, we're focused on that sustainable growth of the organization and on maintaining the momentum of the resistance to this regime that we're seeing by providing a space for folks to be able to express their frustration through demonstrations, lobbying or just commiserating with like-minded people. We have set up committees for communication for elections. For mutual aid. We put on a variety of different activities. We mentioned political education:  activities that can appeal to different people with different abilities and with different backgrounds. Do you want some examples of mutual aid?

MB:   Yeah. 

JB:   Some of the things we're working on is food swaps, item swaps, cleaning up public spaces, skill share workshops for all different types of skills, repair and mending events and we're doing a lot of outreach at events that are implicitly nonpolitical community events, farmers markets, things like that. 

MB:  And is the intent that DSA in Sonoma County will become involved in local, if not state and national politics, as other DSA chapters have certainly in the East Bay? 

JB:   Absolutely. We are currently scouting for State Assembly, City Council, School boards. The thing is we refuse to do simple paper endorsements.  So any candidate endorsed by the chapter is required to have a close public association with us. 

MB:  And then you will fully participate in their campaign?

JB:  Anything less doesn't help us build our power. And we're even requiring that they become members.  For Federal offices, we might be able to afford to be flexible on that. But we'll see how that those talks go. And you know, when it comes to representation in State legislatures and Congress, we're in kind of a unique position in Sonoma County. It’s a largely rural agricultural area that votes overwhelmingly for Democrats. There's a lot of money here. And as a result, there's entrenched institutional power. But so much of  the population is working poor, and there's a long history of radical left politics in the area. 

So I think when it comes to representation in the government we have unique needs. And also a unique advantage in the ability to demand responsiveness to those needs. On the kind of radical history point, our logo and mascot is a chicken, which is a reference to one of the earliest settler communities in this area was a chicken raising commune formed by Eastern European Jewish Communists. You know, we also have a lot of old school hippies around here, and these sorts of liberatory movements have been dormant for like generations. And it's past time that an updated, more useful version was revived. Something capable of delivering material gains for the working class. 

MB:  Of course there's a famous book called Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, by Kenneth Kann, which you probably looked at that chronicles that history which, indeed, goes way back to the twenties in this county. 

JB: And it's so important, too. You know that we're in a position where we're advocating for the proletariat, but also the precariat, and, the importance of agriculture and the housing crisis together, makes that very important. 

MB:  Yeah, and, about two in five workers in this county are working poor. And we've had a long history of living wage and minimum  wage campaigns in an attempt to raise the wage floor. And we've had multiple organizing drives, particularly in hospitality and waste management amongst low wage workers. So there's quite a history of particularly struggles for economic and social justice to be built upon in this county. But you're going to be doing your own endorsement process.

JB:   That's right. 

MB:  But you do plan to be involved, certainly in local, if not state elections. 

JB:   Yes, we're taking an all or nothing approach. The idea is that if we can throw our weight behind somebody, they need to be there for us. So that we're a real constituency at that point. We want to build those relationships on that mutual basis.

MB:  Tell me what role you perceive that DSA is going to play in building an anti-fascist united front in the county. 

 JB:   Yeah, this county is full of people who are already doing good work. So we want our club to serve as like a platform for all types of pro-democracy efforts. We want to be the definitive hub of organizing in the county where we can draw upon resources and knowledge  grounded in Socialist principles of DSA, and to be able to make a material impact on the area and to deepen left unity. We've been central to the new coalitions that  have formed around anti-fascist action in the area, groups for the demonstrations May Day and Labor day groupings designed to bring the local Democratic Party closer to leftist organizing. And actually, right now, we're acting as a sort of a diplomatic corps, mediating strategy-disagreement between the more, I don't know, anarchistic and more conservative groups doing left organizing in the area. And we're well set up to function as a bridge between the different types of progressive organizations. 

JB:   And I I've been involved in this work since, like Occupy Wall Street, basically. And this is the first time that I've seen like a mass shift towards a more radical outlook. Or maybe radical, is not even the right word. But like we're seeing more and more people, recognizing  that the struggles for liberation are all one and the same. We're seeing people who for decades understood the political as being a, you know once every four years, news-binging exercise, for the first time recognizing that their workplace is political, their housing is political, their childcare, their health care, their education is political. That violence abroad and kleptocracy at home are simply different aspects of the class war. And importantly, they see that they have no one left to lobby, like it's only the impotence of the Democratic Party that has revealed it as a tool of capital to its ostensible constituency, who have been loyal to it, maybe since the Party had a real relationship to organized labor. So as folks realize that they do not have the influence that they thought they did on their representatives they’re searching for alternatives, and I think the only viable alternative is democratic Socialism. 

MB:  And how do people get in touch with you?     

JB:   We have a website, socoDSA.org, and we have a bi-monthly newsletter. We have a discord group, which is not restricted to members, and anyone who lives in Sonoma County will see us at pretty much any public events we can get to. 

MB:  And you have a social event once a month. Is that correct? 

JB:   We have a business meeting once a month, and we have a more social, casual sort of get to know you meeting as well. So for this next one that'll be rolled into our  first DSA 101.